The present invention relates to samples of a physical substances such as blood samples, tissue samples or a food samples, taken in laboratories, hospitals, factories, etc., and more particularly, but not exclusively to automatic categorization of such samples.
Every day, millions of samples (say blood or urine samples) are taken from subjects such as human beings or farm animals, from food products, etc.
For example, according to figures released by the World Health Organization (WHO), about 95 million blood samples were taken for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) testing, in the year of 2010 alone.
Traditionally, in laboratory or field testing, each one of several samples (say a blood sample, a food sample, etc.) taken from subjects or products, is labeled with data that is assigned specifically for that sample, by a user such as a laboratory technician, a nurse, etc., or even by the subject himself.
Usually later, but occasionally before that labeling, the samples are subjected to testing, say through Real time PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction), through a chemical reaction which is a part of a blood count, or through another chemical reaction.
The labeling data usually appears as textual description printed or hand-written on a usually, paper made label (say a sticker) physically attached to a container (say a vial or a test tube) holding a sample taken from a specific subject or product.
The textual description may have a variety of formats. The formats may include, but are not limited to: a string that marks the sample as a control sample, a string that identifies a subject (say a patient number), a string that indicates a quantity (say a dilution factor), a string that indicates a testing type required for the sample, a string that marks the sample as positive or negative, etc., as known in the art.
In an age of automation of laboratory and testing equipment, for each sample to be processed by a laboratory or a testing system (say a computerized PCR system), there must be input data labeling the sample.
Indeed, Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) standards introduced by government agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), dictate that medical and laboratory samples are to be identified and their medical containers be labeled, as soon as a sample enters a medical laboratory. Early labeling in the laboratory is necessary, in order to categorize, identify and track the sample, and to reduce any potential errors caused by improper identification or categorization of the sample.
Usually, the labeling data is scanned from a paper sticker applied to the sample's container (say a test tube or a vial), or input manually by a user (say a laboratory technician) who reads and manually enters the data printed on the paper sticker to a computer.
Occasionally, data labeling the sample is input by a user (say a patient or a nurse at a medical facility at which the sample is tested) directly to a computer, even without having the data printed or handwritten on a media (say a sticker) applied to the sample's container.
For example, a laboratory technician may pour a sample (say a blood sample) into a reaction chamber, and input data that labels the sample (even if not printed on the sample's container itself) to a computer that controls a chemical reaction chamber, just before instructing the computer to initiate a chemical reaction such as PCR, in the reaction chamber.
Together with physical parameters values (say fluorescence values) measured during the chemical reaction, the data labeling the sample may serve for analysis of the sample. The analysis yields a result for the sample, say the presence or absence of a certain genetic mutation in the sample.